We’ve always loved Japanese rock gardens. When we lived in Tokyo, every day I walked past the Nezu Museum and admire see their rock entrance. Frequently I’d go into the museum and spend time in the wonderful garden. We worked with Chris Bailey at CS Bailey Landscape on landscape work. We did a few plants but the […]

The old garage was added to the original Techbuilt house in the 1970’s. Because it is not original from the 1950’s we are repurposing the old garage into a storage room. In the next several weeks, the old garage doors will be removed and several windows installed. This week, the old driveway was ripped up.

Our project has allowed us to consider using smart (internet enabled) products in our newly designed home. There are many products on the market that allow your mobile device to control systems in the house. Some systems including music, thermostat, and doorbell made total sense to use our iPhones to control. But we rejected many

At Home with Tomorrow, by Carl Koch, designer of the Techbuilt house with Andy Lewis is a very rare book published by Rinehart and Company in 1958.I was lucky to score an excellent example of this book. It’s fun to page through it to learn about Koch and the design philosophy he used to build

We have exercised regularly for many years. While we love being outdoors to run, mountain bike, swim, and surf, the long cold Massachusetts winters mean that for many months in the year we need to stay fit indoors. In the old house, the family room doubled as our exercise area. While it worked okay, we

Our original Techbuilt house was set up when built in 1958 with six rooms. We had four bedrooms upstairs. On the ground floor there were two rooms – we enjoyed a large living room with dining area and a kitchen, which was separated by a wall. The design for the renovation of the existing house

Like most Techbuilt homes, ours was originally built on a concrete slab. Since our renovation required that we break up the slab in order to install new services, we used this opportunity to convert over to a Hydronic Radiant Heating system. Central Cooling & Heating has been doing the installation and it has been fascinating

For the entire five years that we had been contemplating a renovation and addition project to the very first meeting with our architectural team, we’ve always wanted to have a large living room with cathedral ceilings. The TechBuilt house design always allowed for this approach by removing bedrooms, but I’ve never seen it implemented. So it

Over the past 3 weeks, a specialist team was in our original TechBuilt house removing all the interior elements. The process was much more involved and took much longer than expected because asbestos was found in some of the flooring and wall materials. The use of asbestos was quite common in home building in the

The installation of the beautiful mahogany front door was completed yesterday. It was a thrilling development to the house because the new entry is now operational. I felt like it was a ceremony when we were handed the keys! The door is heavy and solid. I consider the windows surrounding the door, the door itself, and